I had some time on my hands and was looking at the official river temps for The Dalles on July 2 over the past years at DART river data

For 2012 it's 60.8 on 7/2 - the coldest in at least 15 years (as far back as this particular site goes). 2011 was a close 2nd at 61.0. The warmest year was 2004 when it was 66.8 already. There's been a distinct downward trend since then. Here's the raw numbers

Another way of looking at this is what date does the river reach 64F. I used 64F because that's when **I** feel comfy in my "summer" suit (YMMV). Otherwise it's just an arbitrary number. The interesting thing is last year this didn't occur until 7/23 - the latest date I found by far. In 2010 the date was 7/09 and every other year it occurred on or before 7/04 and in 2004 at was 6/23 - an entire month earlier than last year. Since this year has been colder than last year so far river temp wise, it'll be interesting to see when this happens (my bet is sooner - things look to really be warming up after 7/4 as usual).

Kinda guessing here, my recollection could be slightly off, but I'm close

I think 2004 was the year we had VERY LITTLE snow in the WA Cascades and in British Columbia.
The years since then, have been good snow years.
AND... this past season, and last year, we had TONS of snowbase very late into the Spring.

This usually matches up with strong current and cold water temps, early in the summer Gorge sailing season.
Little snow to melt = warm water and slow current, early.
Lots of snow to melt = cold water and fast current, early.
Greg -

I'm sure you're right - 2004 was a bad snow year and I remember 80 deg days in early April that year. And the past few years had lots of late low elevation snow. So it'll be interesting to see when the river temp passed 64 this year. It's still hovering around 15.88C (60.5F) at The Dalles but the flow has reduced from 390 to 325 past few days. With this heat wave coming up I'm guessing we hit 64 around 7/10 or about the same time as 2010.

Just to wrap this up, the water temp at The Dalles dam officially passed 64 today (7/12). This is the 2nd latest date (last year was the latest date 7/23 and 2010 was the previous record 7/10). So still a very late spring/summer overall. That said we just had an awesome week of weather/conditions (along with plenty of wind) and the river warmed up four degrees along the way. So it looks like we're back to a normal summer (finally). Which is nice!

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